Not less unfortunate is the plan on which the significance of the death and resurrection of Christ is dealt with. Having begun with the psychology of the natural man, and the man in process of conversion, Holtzmann endeavours to explain the facts by which redemption is conditioned from this starting-point. He asks what these two events, the death and resurrection, signified for Jesus and what they signified for the believers. Jesus is thereby proved to be the Messiah; the influence upon believers is described on the basis of the classical passages in the Epistles. But the inner connexion of the two effects is not clear, and it is equally unintelligible wherein the saving significance of the death and resurrection consists. Holtzmann is, in fact, still straitly confined to the Reformation and modern point of view, from which the twofold event of the death and resurrection of Christ is considered by itself, in isolation, and an attempt is made to get behind it by psychologising, and thus to discover how, according to the statements of Paul, it produced a complete change in God and man, and effected justification and reconciliation. This attempt overlooks the fact that on the Apostle’s view it is primarily a cosmic [pg 104] event which alters the condition of the whole creation and introduces a new Age, and that everything else is only a consequence of this fundamental effect. As Holtzmann, like his predecessors, has thus omitted to consider the most fundamental aspect of redemption as conceived by Paul, he is not concerned to trace out the most general conception of the effect of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is as much as to say that he, like the rest, is condemned to a mere descriptive treatment, using Pauline phraseology, and is practically unable to give any explanation.